Siren

It was October 23rd. Three months since I killed Drago.

I was in my library, studying Gaelic. There were people in Drago's army who barely knew a word of Nordic, and they needed to be integrated into Viking society. I tried to put out a rule saying no one was a citizen of Berk unless they knew Nordic, but Al immediately saw something wrong with that.

"If a man born to Gaelic parents needs to only learn Nordic to be a citizen of Berk, then he might not learn Gaelic and pass the language on to his children, so maybe it could be that they need to know Nordic and one other language to be a citizen," he said, when I told him about that new rule three weeks prior.

Ever since that night Drago died, Al's people hadn't returned, making Al the chief of the Meatheads, my ankle had healed fully and I could walk on my own, and I had to deal with a lot of bullshit from the people on the islands, leaving me no time to teach the kids.

Not that I missed it.

It all started in August, when I realized that some people from the groups had intermarried, so they couldn't be put onto one island until Al told me that the Slavs (Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians) thought lineage came from the father, so a child born to a Croat mom and Serb dad was considered a Serb. I thought using that principle would help everyone, and it worked out pretty well for the Slavs. It also worked out well in some of the other communities, but with some, they were being persecuted because they were not 'pure.' I was going to move them to another island but Al said they could end up being persecuted everywhere, so it would be in their best interests to put them on Meathead Island, where they wouldn't be persecuted. Besides, there were empty houses of people who would never return, so it was best to put them to use. I made a rule saying that anyone who persecuted another based on separate ethnicities or for not being 'pure' had to pay a monetary sum to the victims. Yes, I'd forced weregild onto people with different beliefs, but it was actually quite difficult to get weregild in. I had multiple conversations with all the tribe chiefs, and we had a rule that no law or decision to go to war and so forth could be passed unless all the chiefs and me agreed fully and a hundred percent, so at the end, we got something similar to weregild in.

That's just some of the bullshit I've dealt with, but for the most part, nothing really bad has happened yet. Which is good, and that's how things should be.

So back to me studying Gaelic in my library. I was staring over the pages, drooling a little bit, and feeling frustrated. Gaelic was extremely difficult to learn, like Annette had told me when I first began studying three weeks after Drago's death. It might not have been as hard as Korean or Japanese, but it was still frustrating. I was only studying the language because it would be more convenient than Mayan or Japanese and because I'd come to an agreement with the other chiefs that we all learn at least one other language other than our native one.

As I was going over vowels, I heard a knock on the door. I rubbed my forehead in exasperation and sighed.

"Come in," I said, feeling overly weary. Whoever it was opened it wide and left it open.

"Hiccup!" the voice cried. I looked over.

The woman was about five foot nine, only two inches shorter than me, and had blonde hair with streaks of gray running through them. There were bags under her blue eyes, like she hadn't slept in a very long time, and she had a kraken around her hair, which was tied into a single braid. She wore a blue sheepskin shirt with spiked padding and a red skirt with mini spikes, complete with typical Viking boots and brown pants.

"I think she's Siren!" she cried. "I think she's our daughter!"